Thursday, July 22, 2010
Media The Opposing-Quotes Dance: Tennessean Asks Thinktank Funded By Big Oil and Coal About Global Warming
Posted by Brantley Hargrove on Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 11:17 AM
- chattahbox
Case in point: A piece in The Tennessean today on the draft of a new report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The long and short of it is the Southeast, with its extensively agricultural economy and coastlines, will suffer as the climate shifts. Last year was the second-warmest on record. This year will likely be the hottest since we started keeping records. There's nothing groundbreaking here. We've heard this before. As climate-change stories go, it's relatively prosaic. What struck Pith the most was the token nay-saying from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a propaganda organ dedicated to global-warming skepticism. In a misguided attempt at fairness, The Tennessean (or The Chattanooga Times Free Press; it's a joint byline) quotes director of energy and global warming policy Myron Ebell: "A lot of the conclusions are highly speculative and debatable and some just go against what we know." He goes on, but does little more than jab feebly at the report.
Yet in the interest of fairness, would it not have been important to note CEI's list of donors? Try Exxon Mobil, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute, Arch Coal, and General Motors, to name a few. Clearly, these companies and organizations have an interest in seeding global-warming doubt. As a reader, Pith suggests it would be fair to know this about a source the paper quotes straight-faced. This isn't to suggest that journalists shouldn't strive to give ink to both sides, but if a source isn't credible, it's our responsibility to weed that source out instead of giving it a whiff of credibility because it satisfies the opposing-viewpoint obligation.
Update: Apparently the highest degree CEI's resident climate-change expert holds is a master's in economics. Again, it's unclear why he's trotted out in the story as some sort of authority, aside from the fact that he disagrees with the premise of the EPA's report.
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The last Ice Age ended 12,000 years ago and by some estimates we're 15,000 years from the next one and any effort mankind makes to alter the course is just pithing into the wind. Sun spots, tectonic plate shift and ocean currents ( check out the effects of El Nino and La Nina ) play a far greater role than the puny amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere. Despite the wailing of the Greenies it would be less costly and more pragmatic to ignore their dire predictions and instead adjust to the current warming trend while preparing for the next Ice Age because when it arrives the world's populations will be compressed towards the equater and most of our current cropland will be destroyed resulting in severe food shortages for billions and billions of people. Anybody up for a soylent burger?
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